Stacy Ratner polished the same case of Mrs. Sees Candy that had been polished for the past six Mondays.
She realized, abruptly, that she hadn’t sold a single unit from that case. Her supplier would be pissed.

Kneeling, she began to re-arrange the Beanie Babies, which had become a mess of kangaroos and
nameless, flightless birds after an energetic and babbling three-year-old had scrounged through the box
earlier in the morning. At least she had sold two of those.

Gently manipulating a floppy toucan, she wondered what her kids were doing. It was two; one should be in
math class, one should be taking art, and the last should be having his afternoon bottle. Mark would pick
them all up on the way back from work, and finally head to the Galleria to pick up their tired, overworked
mom. Then she realized that it was always two in the afternoon; her clock had stopped sometime overnight
on Sunday.

As she tried to correctly shelve every pat Hallmark greeting, Stacy avoided looking out her entrance, into
the almost-abandoned third floor of the Galleria. It pained her to realize that she, like the survivor of some
kind of bad apocalyptic future fantasy, was the last person standing in a shuttered up universe.

In a way, though, she was relieved to have gained a reputation…a good reputation, she mentally amended.
It helped that all of the mall walkers who now made up the mall’s main clientele recommended their
daughters and sisters to the store owned by “that cute little store on the third floor, Stacy’s Hallmark”.
They had kept her solvent for the past year.

But Stacy knew that those days would soon be over.

She had been informed that her lease, when it expired next month, would not be renewed, making way for
the construction of a new office complex. Her shop would become someone’s place of drudgery, the
ground floor filled with snooty soccer moms eating at the Cheesecake Factory.

Stacy was taking the news placidly. Her Prozac was that good.

Mark had been wonderfully attentive to her, doing everything from taking care of the cooking to suggesting
that they take their amounted savings and open up a new shop in a strip mall on the other side of The
Valley. Some tiny, bitter part of Stacy’s mind told her that he had nothing to worry about. He worked for
IBM. He had made all of the right choices.

She, however, couldn’t complain; she really didn’t have any regrets. She and Mark had fallen in love,
chased one another through high school, and finally consented to marry during her junior year at SFU. She
had used up her sense of adventure in that one, wild year back in high school; the abortion had been enough
to shake her out of her sexual sleepwalk. Instead of trying to be like Linda, she spent her senior year
wondering why she had even tried to pattern herself after someone who was so out of control that her
biggest relationships imploded in a cloud of erotic political drama big enough to impress Aaron Spelling.
Listening to Linda complain about how hard it was to date an older man reminded Stacy that she was lucky
to be awake at all instead of stumbling around, somnambulant.

The last time Stacy had seen Linda was at her wedding to Mark –ten years ago, that much she couldn’t
believe. Linda had worn bright violet eyeshadow and cried copiously, then given her cliff notes on anal sex
when they were alone in the lady’s room. Stacy had the gracefulness to tune her friend out; at this point in
her life, games of sex and strategic plotting were annoyances, especially since she had all but won the
gauntlet.

The last mental image she had of Linda featured her friend dancing with Jeff Spiccoli, whom neither Stacy
or Mark new well, but sort of liked, who had crashed the reception. He drank half a keg, inserted himself
into the best man’s toast – to Stacy, anyone interrupting Mike Damone was a blessing- and presented Stacy
and Mark with a wedding gift comprised out of 100 per cent pure Humboldt County herbs. Neither of them
having had a strong fondness for drugs, the stuff stayed in a bottom drawer in the cabin they had rented for
the honeymoon, and was thrown out absent-mindedly at the end of the trip.

When Stacy learned that Jeff had grown up to become a criminal pathologist, her sense of irony was
renewed.

She had become re-focused on the future as college ended. Settling on a business degree and floundering
for a year after college, working at a new burger joint to supplement the income Mark made entry-level at
IBM, Stacy wondered if her life would be a perpetual case of settlement.

Funny how working at a burger joint was suddenly the epitome of uncool at twenty-two. What a difference
a few years made.

If she was just a little bit more uncool, she would have seen what happened next as a miracle; she and Mark
had been scrounging around the Galleria, looking for cheap flatware, when she noticed that the card shop
on the third floor was having a going-out-of-business sale. A couple of calls informed her that the owner’s
business had been bad for a week; her target clientele of older persons didn’t really match the mall’s young,
hip spirit. Stacy found herself cosigning a bank loan with mark, frighteningly soon after her parents had
picked up the tab for her college loans, financing everything off of their rapidly-fading car, the only piece
of valuable property they owned outright. The loan was barely enough to cover a one-year lease. She had
no money for remodeling or stocking the shelves. As opening day drew closer, Stacy began to tear her hair
out.

When they showed up for Christmas dinner at her parent’s house bone-thin and white from stress, Brad had
stepped in.

Her brother had done well for himself; after becoming manager of the Mi-T-Mart, he managed to buy a
franchise for himself. That franchise had turned into a chain of stores, all under his regional management.
They had always maintained a close relationship, whether he was running around in a pirate uniform or
presiding over a family dinner in a three-piece suit from Brooks Brothers, and the stringy, somewhat greasy
appearance she and Mark had put forth at that dinner had concerned him.

She hadn’t wanted his charity…well, that was what she’d told him. But Brad had willingly given her the
amount she had needed to open the shop. The following Christmas, when Stacy’s Hallmark had turned a
profit thanks to careful stocking of novelty items along with the usual teddy-bears-and-cards motif of the
previous shop, Stacy cut her brother a check for the exact amount he had lent her the year before. Plus a
little extra. He had rolled his eyes at noticing that she had tipped him five dollars .

Despite rapidly changing motifs, Stacy’s shop evoked elemental memories. She had spent the long hours
of her first pregnancy there, venting her own anxiety in doodles on register slips. Her mind would trip back
to her fifteenth year, to the disaster which had led to her abortion. She never regretted the choice. Only the
execution; the ultimate loneliness of going through the procedure by herself. At fifteen, she had been too
young to even consider going through with the pregnancy. And yet she felt an indefinable anger and
sadness whenever she thought of that lost fetus. It was one more issue to be swallowed down, never
thought of. It helped that Mike had been in jail in New York at the time. Had she been forced to see him
daily, she would have lost her temper.

Stacy had gone into labor between the mug and teddy bear aisle. Four hours later, her first daughter,
Jessica, had been born. When the state’s governor had stopped by years ago, he had shaken Stacy’s hand
and they had both ended up on the local news. She, however, couldn’t bring herself to vote for the man at
his re-election.

Gradually, exciting moments like these were worn away by the mendacity of the everyday world. And then
the Galleria began to die, slowly, their clientele being eaten away by time and changes in the wind. When
her own daughters, Jessica and Danielle, turned seven and five, they preferred shopping anywhere but their
mother’s old hangout. Her son, Kevin, was too young to have a preference either way.

Familiar landmarks changed and closed. The arcade had gone under when home consoles became more
popular. The clothing boutiques she had spent all of her teenage paychecks at mutated into Gaps and Debs
before dying. Record Stores became Cassette Worlds which became CD Marts before everyone became
very cheap and decided that used music stores were the way to go. Even her shop had changed; instead of
catering to kids interested in Smurfs and ET, she bought Beanie Babies and Precious Moments figurines.

The movie theatre had died, and she and Mark attended one last show together…some sort of loud action
picture, where she had tried to make out with him while he fixated on the plot. When Perry’s Pizza
shuttered, she and Brad took in one last slice together as a sort of toast to their childhood ambitions…he
had been going through a divorce at the time, and needed the sustenance. By then, the food court was a
ghost town. And now, on the first day of the end of the shop’s life, she felt like the last ghost around.

She presented a smile to a woman as she wandered into the shop. She seemed to be around Stacy’s age,
and, in her sweater and jeans, appeared the perfect apparition of a soccer mom. She browsed through the
boxes of candy, reading the back of each box for a short time. Selecting one, she then headed to the card
rack, and picked one from the ‘Anniversary’ section. Picking up two boxes of Junior Mints, she placed
each item on the counter. Stacy quickly rang her up.

“Is it true what I heard, about the mall closing?” She asked, abruptly.

“Yeah.” Stacy said. “they’re tearing everything down and putting up an office complex.”

The woman shook her head. “I used to shop here with my friends all the time. We were total valley girls.”
She effected the accent, and Stacy smiled wanly. She wanted to snap to the woman that, because she had
stopped shopping there, the mall was dead. It would have been so vital and lively. It could have been, but
it wouldn’t.

“Who needs another office building?” The woman continued, shaking her head. “So silly. This place has
charm and character. And it used to be fun.”

“That’s $9.75.” Stacy said, as she bagged the merchandise.

“Now it’s all just mall walkers. So sad.” She handed Stacy a ten. Stacy swiftly parceled out her change.

“Here you go, and here’s your receipt.” The woman took both items and smiled.

“I hope you’ll open up somewhere else. Keep the Galleria spirit alive!”

Stacy remembered hearing something in a news report about the Galleria being an architectural eyesore,
and somehow she doubted the city council wanted it’s ‘spirit’ living on. But she nodded and smiled, and
the woman, finally, left.

Her heart sped up a little when she saw a very familiar face rapidly heading in her direction. He waved his
hand, and she curled her finger, bidding him to come and get her, already. He was as he had always been,
despite the power suit.

“Who, me?” He mouthed, and she shook her head. “Mark!” She replied. Without hesitation, he made his
way toward the shop.

She almost vaulted over the counter. The clock on the wall, frozen forever at three PM, reminded her that
even a clock frozen in time was right at least twice a day. And so day frozen in space could be cured in two
easy steps over the wall.